The first practical guide to research methods in memory studies. This book provides expert appraisals of a range of techniques and approaches in memory studies, and focuses on methods and methodology ...as a way to help bring unity and coherence to this new field of study.
This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the principles, perspectives, and main emphases of studying processes of communicative remembering and media memory. Its chapters analyze the field ...of communication memory studies and link it to complementary approaches from the social sciences, the humanities, and cultural studies.
This article addresses the lack of analysis of the specific ways in which the online environment configures the relationship between the processual dynamics of nostalgia which allow for both creative ...and conservative modes of identification and the commercial exploitation and commodification of the nostalgia produced and articulated in online communities. We introduce an empirical case study of one of the companies operating on Facebook as a nostalgia maker: DoYouRemember.com and consider analytical frameworks for future work on the (online) ‘nostalgia business’ and its economic and political dimensions.
Abstract
This article sets out some of the analytical moves that are necessary to developing a distinctive area of research called postcolonial memory studies. A key barrier to synthesising insights ...from postcolonial and memory studies has been a reductive approach to analogue and digital technologies which operate as vehicles for memory. Three analytical moves are needed to decentre, or at the very least de-naturalise the technological narratives and ecologies of Europe and the US. Media memory studies needs to draw more effectively on postcolonial studies to position mediated memory as inextricably connected to the legacies of colonialism and empire; develop a much broader account of media infrastructures emerging from what is increasingly characterised as ‘global media studies’; make an empirical and analytical shift away from the primacy of digital communications technologies and to explore technologies, not just as artefacts but as knowledge generating cultural practices. The combined value of these three shifts in approaches to media and communications technologies in memory studies research has considerable potential for developing postcolonial media memory studies research which offers a thorough and empirically grounded analysis of the complex ways in which the legacies of colonialism shape and structure the ways in which practices and performances of remembering are mediated in contemporary social life. This shift towards postcolonial memory studies can be seen as part of the wider project of what Anna (Amza) Reading has in this volume called ‘rewilding memory’ by rethinking ‘the underlying ecologies of knowledge within studies of memory’.
This article responds to an absence of memory studies research methodologies for exploring embodied memories, including its form and content, the lived practices it involves, and its embeddedness in ...wider socio-political discourses. While conceptualisations of embodiment are central in the field of memory studies, its methodological consequences remain under-developed. We are proposing dance-based methods as having significant potential to address alternative ways of knowing and relating to the past. Drawing on empirical work on both professional and social dance among British Bangladeshi women in London, conducted as part of the 5-year research project Migrant Memory and the Postcolonial Imagination, we found embodied remembering to be a social form of doing that can serve to create, preserve and negotiate shared pasts.
This article examines the conceptualisation and use of memory in the social sciences, both as a methodological tool and as an object of research. The article situates memory as a vast potential ...resource for the social sciences in the exploration of relations between public and private life, agency and power, and the past, present and future. It goes on to recognise that the methodological issues surrounding the use of memory have, with few exceptions, rarely received sustained attention. The article argues for, and moves towards, developing a coherent account of the variety of practical techniques of using memory in data collection and analysis, and their appropriate use within a clear epistemological framework which distinguishes itself from conventional historiography and it's criteria of validity. It is argued that without this attention to method, memory will remain on the margins of social science research.
This article argues that claims of time in late-modernity collapsing or becoming irretrievably accelerated do not sufficiently account for the range of experiences of time that are supported in a ...media-saturated culture. Achieving this requires an empirical and conceptual shift. Research on the domestication of media technologies provides an initial empirical framework for this kind of exploration, but as well as rhythmic practices and processes of media use, experiences of time involves the imaginative and symbolic provisions of the media. Using Bergson’s concept of the zone of indeterminacy, the mediation of time will be considered as occurring in zones of intermediacy. This conceptual tool allows an exploration of the relational nature of temporal experience and the active negotiation of various mediated temporalities that this involves.
The turn towards transnational memory has largely focused on particular sites and modes of remembering, focusing on the creation of memories between and beyond nation-states in institutional ...politics, the media, migration and to a lesser degree social movements. Despite its significance for encountering other people’s past, international tourism remains under-examined in the scholarship due to a focus on macro-developments, a polarisation along a binary of cosmopolitan versus conflictive memories and a discounting of memories shaped by commercialised logics. Drawing on a case study of Russian tourism in Tallinn, Estonia, this article makes the case for a closer examination of tourist encounters as part of research on transnational memory. It examines how tourism works as an arena for the production and circulation of memories through direct transnational encounters, refracting and modifying macro-political memories within a commercialised service environment. We analyse the role of tour guides as mnemonic intermediaries and show how in their work with Russian tourists they navigate pasts that form the subject of on-going memory conflicts at the level of international politics. Their representational strategies deemphasise contested pasts and avoid conflicts through neutrality and compromise. At the same time, tourist encounters can also be used to create spaces for dialogue and the formation of positive relations. Overall, the article demonstrates both the productivity and frictions of tourist settings for transnational remembering and makes the case for considering more ambiguous cases in transnational memory research.
This article demonstrates the need always to consider change against continuity and continuity against change in the analysis of mnemonic technologies. It does so by exploring what has happened in ...the move from analogue to digital photography, looking, in particular, at how this has affected the meanings of personal photographs and the practices of remembering associated with them. In contrast with technologically determinist perspectives which have been, however latently, manifest in writing on new media, the value of exploring vernacular photography as a specifically mnemonic practice is that it turns our attention to the ways in which photographic practices are bound up with longer term social uses and cultural values. Our analysis focuses on changes in four key categories of photographic practice that relate to the analogue/digital shift: photo-taking, photo-storing, photo-viewing, photo-sharing – all of which have consequences for the uses of photography as a mnemonic resource. They have all been altered in varying degrees by the advent of digital technologies, but with people continually making comparative evaluations of old and new, drawing on the former as a key aspect of learning how to use the latter.
In this article we introduce the themed issue ‘Mediated Mobilities’. We begin by articulating some of the potential relationships between media and mobility critically addressing the key conceptual ...distinctions that underpin them and the methodological demands placed on media studies when exploring the complex ways in which mobility is embedded in contemporary media ecologies. In the first instance we consider precisely what is meant by mobility, and, more specifically, interrogate the dynamic relationship between mediated mobility and immobility. We then move on to develop a methodological framework or agenda for research on mediated mobilities. This framework traces how existing analytical trajectories in media studies research need to be developed and synthesized in order to be able to account for the multiple modes of mobility facilitated by media technologies, texts, institutions and audiences. In the last part of the article we examine the development of innovative methodologies and forms of analysis that give emphasis to movement and trajectory, but also human and algorithmic agency.
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